Shareware Beach

I almost bought a Mac Mini a couple of month ago. I didn’t because I wanted to wait until I could get one with the Tiger release of OS X. I guess I’ll wait some more now, until I can get one with Intel Inside.

No, I don’t have any plans to port any JGsoft products to OS X. But I do want to keep an eye on the Mac market. Apple has been getting a lot of good press lately, and the geek in me likes to stay on top of such things.

We do get regular requests for Mac versions of our products. Unfortunately, since Borland Delphi is not available for the Mac, that’s unlikely to happen. Maintaining two separate code bases is not worth it given the Mac’s small market share. I also don’t know of any development tool (cross-platform or not) that is significantly superior to Delphi, making a switch of tools worthwhile.

I do think that switching to Intel is a good move for Apple. I’d be very interested in buying a Mac if it could triple-boot OS X, Windows and Linux, or maybe even run OS X and Linux in a VMware session on Windows. Then I’d have one set of hardware for both bread-and-butter development work (on Windows), and for experimentation on the niche platforms.

But I think the real opportunity for Apple is to court the development tool vendors like Borland. It’s understandable that Borland doesn’t want to rewrite Delphi’s whole compiler and debugger back-ends for a CPU architecture with a tiny market share. But once the Mac runs on the same CPU everybody else uses, it’s only a matter of APIs. Delphi already supports various APIs: Win32, WinForms (.NET) and Borland’s own VCL in Win32 and .NET flavors. Adding Cocoa should be feasible. The IDE could remain Windows-hosted, cross-compiling to the Mac. Maybe I’ll need two computers for that after all.

Whatever happens, these surely are exciting times. It’s good to see the two major industry players, Intel and Microsoft, are facing some serious competition. Even while Apple switches, IBM’s “Power” line of CPUs is gaining ground on Intel, as it will power the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. And the same switch has the potential to make OS X a stronger contender to Windows. If Windows can be installed on a Mac (which obviously comes with OS X preinstalled), buying a Mac is suddenly a whole lot less risky.